November 24, 2011 Well, I just spent a fair portion of Thanksgiving morning updating the Textbook History database of Eugenics in College Biology Textbooks. In addition to correcting more than a few embarrassing misspellings and broken links, I’ve added commentary on two later editions of Biology by Claude A. Villee (1967 and 1972), the second…
MAD magazine was a rare treat when I was a young teenager, a little expensive and difficult to acquire on a regular basis, but a standard newsstand pickup ahead of road trips and summer weeks away. At the time, the early 1970s, MAD was hitting its highest circulation numbers. Yet its humor always felt weirdly out of step, recycled, even a bit reactionary. Of course that’s partially why I liked it. It was creepy anthropology, a moist record of the guilty id of my older siblings and younger aunts and uncles, subversive if a little toothless.
The magazine had its culturally relevant bits, like Don Martin’s ononmonpidic explosions and Sergio Aragones’ slapstick marginals, but on balance MAD was weighed down by filler of a sensibility that went out with Eisenhower.
Then there was Alfred E. Neuman.
August 7, 2011 During the first decades of the twentieth century, WASP elites in the U.S. got themselves into quite a tizzy about sex and race. Metaphysical threats, like the death of “virgin forests,” the “darkening tide” of immigration and the dreaded “white plague” of Tuberculosis, combined with economic threats, like the new permanent income…
Updated 30 July 2011 I’d been trying for a couple of months to kick out an article on a curious college biology textbook, The World of Life by Wolfgang F. Pauli (who should not be confused with the more famous physicist, Wolfgang E. Pauli). Published in 1949, The World of Life had long fascinated me,…
TitleDateAuthor(s)PublisherEugenics 0-5 An Introduction to General Biology1904Sedgwick, William T. (M) MIT; Wilson, Edmund B. (M) ColumbiaHenry Holt and Company, New York0 No mention Biology1912Conn, Herbert William (M) WeslyanSilver, Burdett, Boston0 No mention The Principles of Biology1913Hamaker, J. I. (M) Randolph-Macon Woman’s CollegeP. Blakiston’s Son and Company, Philadelphia 0 No mention Biology1914Calkins, Gary N. (M) ColumbiaHenry…
June 25, 2011 A weird thing happened in the years right after World War II: new college-level biology textbooks, rather than dropping the subject of eugenics, doubled down and began to defend the ideology with more aggressive rhetoric and moments of near-pornographic spectacle. Biology: And Its Relation to Mankind by Baylor graduate and Stetson University…
April 17, 2011 Ellsworth Huntington was one of the early twentieth century’s most prolific science writers. The author of 28 books, contributor to 29 others and author of more than 240 articles, [1] Huntington was a climatic determinist who held that geography was the “basis for history.” [2] Civilization according to Huntington owed its rise…
January 29, 2011 Prior to World War II, America’s protectors thought the country’s innocence could be guarded at its gates. Citizen biologists saw the nation’s border as kind of cartographic diaphragm, not entirely reliable in individual instances, but adequate to the task of containing the pool of potential breeders. But conflict had led to contact,…
January 6, 2011 Historian Audra Wolff has completed the Herculean task of creating a folder-level list of the contents of the Bentley Glass archive at the APS – all 90 linear feet of it! See her note on Facebook. Interested scholars are invited to email Wolfe for a copy. Glass apparently saved every scrap of…
December 31, 2010 I’ve been playing around with the new Google Ngram Viewer, an amazing application that allows searches within the text of the 5 million or so books Google has scanned to date. The Ngram Viewer allows users to enter multiple words or phrases and a date range, and then returns a graph of…